[ecrea] cfp: Mediated Urbanism - double special issue in International Communication Gazette

CALL FOR PAPERS

A special Double Special Issue of the International Communication Gazette
to be published by Sage Publishers on

Mediated Urbanism

With sections on Designing the Urban Stages & Urban Audience Activities

Guest Editors:
Seija Ridell (University of Tampere, Finland; COST Action ISO906 WG3)
Frauke Zeller (Wilfrid Laurier University, Canada; COST Action ISO906 WG3)

Deadline for abstracts: May 31st 2012

Designing the Urban Stages section (CfP 1 below) focuses on the planning 
and design aspects
of contemporary digitally embedded and media-saturated cities.

Urban Audience Activities section (CfP 2 below) focuses on the diversity 
of audience activities
in the multi-spaced and multiply scaled contemporary cities.

The multiple and multiply divided nature of urban reality has deepened 
in novel ways through the
development of networked digital technologies. The use of portable media 
devices in particular
has rendered urban space increasingly multi-layered, as people may 
interact with their physically
absent communities and visit online places while being on the move in 
the city. At the same time,
through their smart gadgets, people are integrated with the 
software-supported urban
infrastructure which grows out from an equally invisible but 
nevertheless material global technorhizome.
This makes them active though not necessarily self-reflexive 
contributors to the
dynamics of spatial power that today conditions the forms of urban 
communication and agency.
The contemporary urban setting has started in recent years to 
increasingly fascinate scholars and
practitioners as a context for people¡¦s media relations. However, there 
is, as yet, little research on
how the complex processes of city planning and design shape the 
digitalized and media saturated
city and how these processes articulate and are entangled with power 
relations. Nor is there much
research on the ways people shift between various media and technology 
related modes of action
while dwelling in and moving about the city.

In this double special issue Mediated urbanism of the International 
Communication Gazette,
which follows up on the 2008 ICG special issue on Communicative Cities 
(edited by Gary
Gumpert and Susan Drucker), we wish to address the digitally sustained 
urban environment in
terms of public life. Our approach in the issue is to combine the 
perspectives of city planning and
design, on the one hand, with the perspective of people¡¦s activities as 
urban audiences, on the
other. We welcome and strongly encourage for both interrelated sections 
contributions that foster
dialogues across disciplinary boundaries.

Important Dates:
- Abstracts (600-800 words and to include author¡¦s professional status 
and institutional
affiliation) submission: May 31st 2012
- Notifications of acceptance: June 30th 2012
- Full manuscript submission: September 15thth 2012

Submissions (abstracts and full manuscripts), in English, should be sent 
electronically as Word
documents to Seija Ridell (email: (seija.ridell /at/ uta.fi)) and Frauke Zeller 
(email: (fzeller /at/ wlu.ca)).
Manuscripts should include an abstract of 100-150 words, with a 
suggested target of 8000 words
(including notes and references) and include 8-10 key words. For 
specific manuscript submission
guidelines, please go to: http://gaz.sagepub.com/

If you have any queries regarding the suitability of your potential 
contribution or any other
inquiries, please contact the guest editors:
Seija Ridell, (seija.ridell /at/ uta.fi)
Frauke Zeller, (fzeller /at/ wlu.ca)

Cfp 1: Designing the urban stages

We are accustomed to thinking of the city as a physical setting where 
tightly packed
congregations of people co-exist and multiple ways of life are visible 
to each other. Along with
the ever more thorough digitalisation of infrastructure and media 
platforms, as well as the
proliferation of portable, networked and location-aware devices, the 
urban environment has
become increasingly multidimensional in nature by encompassing 
intersecting and overlapping
physical as well as virtual spatial layers. While drifting about in the 
city with our handhelds, we
are not only addressed by the pervasively present mass media and witness 
to other people¡¦s
presentations of self, our sensibilities are mediated and extended by 
the ambient techno-rhizome.
In this special issue of ICG, we wish to pose the question of how the 
contemporary digitalised
city may be theorized and explored as a public space in its double sense 
of simultaneous showing
and sharing, that is, both as a stage for personal and communally 
oriented public performances
and as an arena for public encounters and dialogues. We invite 
contributions that discuss the
urban environment in terms of relating city planning and design to 
changing spatial interaction
and media use. Abstracts may be theoretically, methodologically or 
empirically oriented
contributions as well as practice-based pieces that deal with but are 
not restricted to the future of
physical public space in the times of neoliberal politics, 
cyber-capitalism, digitalised urban
infrastructure and networked mobile technologies.
There is a growing body of research on ubiquitous and 
ambient/associative new media
technologies in present-day cities and the multiplicity of spatial 
interconnections that mobile
devices enable for the urban dweller. Considerably less has been studied 
thus far how the urban
stages themselves are structured and produced and in what ways people¡¦s 
media-related activities
are implicated in these processes. Thus, both theoretically oriented and 
empirically-grounded
contributions might consider a range of issues and questions including, 
but not confined to:
- Adaptive / responsive urban architecture
- Interaction design and urban spaces
- Interactive urban design for the communication with/among citizens
- New (mediated) laws of (digital) form
- The politics of digitally mediated urban form
- Pre-conceptions of media use and reception in urban planning and design
- Location-aware mobile media and the urban public space
- The role of planners, architects, designers and ICT professionals in 
the evolvement of
urban public sphere
- The dynamics of power in the production of software-supported and 
media-saturated
urban space

Cfp 2: Urban audience activities
To date, there is little research on how people act as audiences in 
urban environment. Yet digital
technologies have not only moulded the practices of media audiencing in 
the home but
diversified in significant ways outdoor audience activities. Networked 
portable devices in
particular have enabled and forced new kinds of urban audience activity.
In this special issue of ICG, we want to focus on the simultaneous 
specificity and multiplicity of
audience activities in the present-day, spatially multi-layered and 
multi-scaled cities. In terms of
theoretical orientation, we suggest that both the ¡¥space of 
appearance¡¦ and ¡¥space of collectivity¡¦,
distinguished by Hannah Arendt as immanent aspects of public space, are 
important in
investigating how people act as audiences in contemporary techno-cities. 
More specifically, how
is the reception of urban media (such as audiencing the media facades 
and digitally embedded
displays in museums or airports and other public and semi-public 
spaces), on the one hand, and
the diverse uses of personal mobile devices, on the other hand, embedded 
in the dynamics of
urban spatial power? In addition, we encourage audience-focused 
approaches on the softwareenabled
articulations of urban public space in its collective and democratic 
sense. Using a
Habermasian vocabulary, the question concerns the combined and 
intersecting public spheres that
can be built differently by people in their uses of networked and 
location-aware portable
technologies and the offerings on the urban (mass) media platforms. We 
invite explorations on
how people act as audiences (and publics) in these spatially hybrid 
public sphere constellations.
We welcome contributions from various disciplines and fields of research 
that range from
historical reviews and theoretical reflections on urban audiencehood and 
its transformations, to
discussions of the methodological challenges in the study of urban 
audience practices to
empirical case studies. The latter may approach the diversity of urban 
audience activities by
exploring some of its forced, accidental and/or voluntary instances that 
span from the reception of
industrially manufactured mass media spectacles and artistic 
interventions to audiencing (in)
interpersonal or playful communication to audience activities as part of 
bottom-up and corporeal
urban experience.
Contributions may deal with and combine, but are not confined to, the 
following topics:
- Audience, public, player, activist ¡K : shifting between the mediated 
modes of urban
(inter)action
- Audiencing the (mass) media-saturated city
- Transformations of urban audience practices
- Mobile audiencing in the multi-spaced urban environment
- The multiple scales of urban audience activities
- Spectacular urban audience activities and their politics
- Interpersonal audiencing in the urban context
- Forms of captive audiencing and the dynamics of urban spatial power
- Bodily rhythms and routines of urban audience activities
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